A client called the moment he found it: one sentence, buried in the legal section of his page, mentioning a lawsuit that had been settled years earlier. He wanted it gone within the hour and was certain the rules were on his side, because the subject, after all, was a living person, and he had read somewhere that Wikipedia protects living people. He was right about the policy and wrong about what it protects.
Wikipedia's rule on biographies of living people, known internally as BLP, does let an editor remove contentious material immediately, without waiting for the usual back-and-forth discussion that governs most other disputes on the site. That is a real and unusual power. It exists because getting a claim about a living person wrong can cause real harm fast, and the ordinary pace of consensus-building is too slow for that risk. But the power turns on one condition only: whether the material is properly sourced, not whether it is flattering.
Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced should be removed immediately, without waiting for discussion.
In this client's case, the sentence traced to a report in a national newspaper, written years after the settlement, in an article specifically about the case. That is exactly the kind of independent secondary source the policy is built to keep in. Being unflattering is not the same as being poorly sourced, and BLP was never written to erase the first just because someone asked.
The same rule, used the other way, is often more useful to a client than the outcome he was hoping for the first time. We have removed, on the same afternoon we found them, unsourced claims about awards that were never given and academic titles nobody could verify, added by an enthusiastic employee months earlier and left standing because nobody had checked. Those came down under the identical clause, because contentious and unsourced describes flattering material exactly as well as it describes unflattering material.
So the question we ask about any sentence on a BLP page, before we ask whether we like it, is where it came from and whether that source would survive being checked. That is the only lever the policy actually gives anyone, in either direction.
